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Three and a half years have passed since the afternoon when the stock markets went into a trillion-dollar free fall and just as suddenly reversed course, recovering 80 percent of the loss. It all happened in less than 45 minutes.

The “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, was the unintended result of high-frequency trading (or HFT), in which heavy-duty computers execute sophisticated trading strategies in millionths-of-a-second time frames. HFT has been the source of many smaller crashes and other mishaps, occasionally shutting down trading venues and even putting firms out of business. Yet the practice continues to grow, while the transaction times get shorter and shorter.

A few weeks ago, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has jurisdiction over almost all derivatives markets under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, published a paper evaluating various “kill switches” that might contain the damage when the machines go haywire again.

When, not if, because, as the CFTC’s Concept Release points out, HFT trader bots now control more than 90 percent of all exchange-traded derivatives – the “financial instruments of mass destruction” that Warren Buffett warned about, five years before the 2008 crash proved him right. In other words, we have reached the point in the sci-fi movies when the machines truly take command of the nuclear arsenal.

So it is time to ask a few basic questions about HFT. Starting with: What good is it? How does society benefit when we reduce the average trade-completion time from, say, 125 milliseconds to 5 milliseconds?

By society, I do not mean a single financial institution or even the entire financial sector. The increasing speed of transactions is driven by competition among trading firms. Speed is crucial to any trader’s ability to act before other traders do. But no one has identified an advantage to the overall functioning of the markets or the wider economy when traders get sucked into an “arms race” of escalating speed and automation. In fact, even the most passionate HFT advocates would largely agree that the public ceased to benefit several developmental stages ago.

The case for this type of trading rests on the premise that it lubricates the markets by adding more “liquidity.” A liquid market, however, is characterized by plentiful and reliable offers to both buy and sell; it must be balanced, since the market crashes if everyone wants to sell at once.

No doubt, HFT increases volume by allowing transactions to be made and reversed with blinding speed. But volume and liquidity are very different. In markets dominated by HFT, new information stimulates the trading algorithms of multiple firms, which behave like herds of impala stampeding across the Serengeti, this way and that. Prices jump up and down until the pointless activity peters out. The Flash Crash was no more than an extreme example of what goes on day in and day out in today’s markets.

HFT traders often do supply executable price quotes, which superficially increase liquidity. True liquidity, however, comes when offers can be relied upon,allowing investors to predict whether the transactions they seek can be completed within their preferred price range. Because HFT traders can morph from providers to consumers of liquidity whenever the herd abruptly shifts from buy to sell, they create uncertainty rather than predictability.

Ultimately, the diminished reliability of the financial markets is a burden on businesses and governments that seek to raise capital. By inducing short-swing market volatility, HFT traders make money from each other, but also from investors. Investors pass the cost of uncertainty on to businesses and governments, burdening their productive activities. Thus, the public pays for the non-productive churning of securities and derivatives markets by HFT traders.

The goal of each trading firm is to profit from the ability to perceive and act on information more quickly and accurately than others do. But there is no rule of nature or humanity which dictates that a spiral of such advantages must translate into improved intermediation of capital between investors and those seeking investment. Indeed, HFT has made the markets less efficient, by making them more volatile. Since investors must price this added unreliability into their decisions, raising capital for productive purposes becomes costlier, and the extra cost is passed on to the rest of us as consumers and taxpayers.

In fairness to the CFTC, it was not asked to decide whether HFT actually serves any valid purpose. Yet the whole premise of its Concept Release is that such trading creates new and serious risks. Surely there should be some compensating benefit to justify those risks. The Concept Release does not attempt to identify any such benefit.

Regulators have been hesitant to slow traders down, in part because doing so might be seen as stifling innovation. But HFT is not innovation in any real sense; it is just the accumulation of computing capacity and efficient wiring into the exchanges, with software that simply encodes trading strategies that have been around for years.

Unfortunately, businesses that can afford to compete by trading at nanosecond speed also have the wherewithal to exert tremendous influence in Washington. The big financial firms will use this influence to protect HFT because it gives them advantages in the markets and the ability to extract ever more value from the real economy. There has been plenty of conversation about HFT by lawmakers and regulators. Identifying ways to manage the risks is laudable, though it is far from clear how effective such techniques will really be. In any case, Washington needs to go further, and muster the independence to put some meaningful speed bumps in place to slow the bots down to a really safe speed.

— Wallace Turbeville

Wallace Turbeville is a former vice president of Goldman Sachs, a fellow at Demos and a member of the derivatives task force of Americans for Financial Reform.

New protections are now in place for people wiring money overseas. Consumers need to know about these safeguards, so they can exercise their rights, get the information to shop for the best prices, and make sure their hard-earned money ends up where they mean for it to go.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010 called for these new remittance rules, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is implementing them. The rules apply to transfers of $15 or more handled by a bank, thrift, credit union, or remittance company. Payment processors will have to do three things that were not previously required:

Provide prepayment disclosure of most fees, taxes and the exchange rate (or in some cases an estimate of the exchange rate), enabling customers to know how much the process costs, and how much the people on the other end of the transaction will actually receive – before they decide how to send the money.

Allow most customers at least half an hour to cancel a payment without charge.

Set up a complaint system with a timeline, and assume responsibility for abuses or mistakes committed by their agents. In short, if the money never reaches the specified destination, that simple fact will now be grounds for consumers to get a refund.

The past three decades have been a period of explosive growth for Wall Street and the financial industry. Meanwhile, a tiny slice of the population has claimed an ever-bigger share of this country’s economic rewards. The highest-earning one percent of Americans collected roughly 20 percent of total income last year; the top .01 percent – not enough people to fill a football stadium – had 5.5 percent of the income.

Could there be a connection here? Could our booming financial sector, which now generates an astonishing 30 percent of all corporate profits (more than double the figure of thirty years ago), help explain America’s rapid ascent to the highest level of economic inequality since the eve of the Great Depression, and the highest of any of the world’s rich nations? A growing number of economists and other authorities think the first trend may have more than a little something to do with the second.

The economic and political establishments long ago settled on a theory of rising inequality: technology and globalization, they told us, were carving a rift through the American labor force between those with and without the right kind of education and know-how. This idea was criticized from the start for ignoring a formidable corporate campaign to rewrite the rules of the U.S. economy at workers’ expense, and over time it has increasingly failed to account for the reality of who is getting ahead and who is falling behind.

In his 1991 book “The Work of Nations,” former (then future) Labor Secretary Robert Reich embraced a version of the “skills-gap” story. But in his recent film “Inequality for All,” Reich has more to say about discrepancies of power than of skill.

The longer this trend continues, in fact, the more it resembles the Occupy Movement’s picture of a soaring 1 percent and a lagging 99 percent. Out of every dollar of income growth between 1976 and 2007, the richest one percent of U.S. households collected 58 cents; and after taking a big hit in the financial crisis, they were soon back on track, capturing an extraordinary 95 percent of all the income gains between 2009 and 2012. To put it more plainly, since the beginning of the current economic “recovery,” the top 1 percent (who make upwards of $400,000 a year in household income) are pretty much the only ones who have recovered.

Within that small subset of Americans, executives, traders, fund managers and others associated with the financial sector loom large, comprising about a seventh of the one-percenters and accounting for about one fourth of their income gains over the past thirty-plus years. That’s not counting the many lawyers and consultants with financial sector clientele, or the growing number of executives of nonfinancial companies who seem to make most of their money these days through stock options and short-term financial plays. Together, corporate executives and financial sector employees account for well over half the post-1980 income growth of the top 1 percent and more than two-thirds of the even more remarkable gains of the top 0.1 percent.

Pinpointing the causes of an economic trend is a hard business. But there is global as well as historical evidence for a link between financial sector expansion and rising inequality. Studies of rich and relatively poor nations alike suggest that inequality goes up when societies tie their fortunes to a free-wheeling financial industry and the easy flow of global capital. There is also substantial research to suggest that much of the financial sector’s recent growth has come by extracting wealth from other areas of the economy, not by spurring innovation and opportunity for the society at large.

Several recent studies trace the industry’s pay-and-profit surge mostly to its success in the political and regulatory arenas. See, for example, this paper by Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef of New York University and the University of Virginia, who attribute between 30 and 50 percent of the financial sector’s recent gains to economic “rents.” That’s basically a polite way of describing the ability of many of today’s financial heavyweights to use their market clout, their inside knowledge and various explicit and implicit taxpayer subsidies to make money out of thin air.

Banking and finance were not always a road to fabulous riches in this country. As recently as the early 1980s – and throughout much of the 20th century – there was almost no pay differential between financial and non-financial professionals. Today, by contrast, financial workers make about 1.83 times as much as other white-collar workers. You’d have to go back to the Roaring Twenties, at the tail end of America’s original Gilded Age, to find another period when financial sector incomes and profits reached such conspicuous heights. That should tell us something.

In any case, these are pivotal questions for the country – and unavoidable questions for those seeking a path toward what President Obama has been calling a “middle-out” rather than a top-down economy. Broad prosperity, the president says, calls for greater public investment in education, infrastructure and other long-term needs, and for higher taxes on the wealthy to help pay for such things. That may be a worthy agenda. It has certainly proved to be a politically difficult agenda. But in a country that has let its financial sector become an engine of inequality, more will be required.

If we believe in our founding ideal of America as a land where children should start off on roughly the same footing regardless of history or ancestry, we will all have to screw up our courage and refocus on (among other challenges) the unfinished work of making sure we have a financial economy that serves the real economy, not the other way around.

Yet, in a story today, “Feds Solve Problems for Unhappy Bank Customers,” by Herb Weisbaum of CNBC, American Bankers Association lobbyist Nessa Feddis criticized our study by simply repeating the industry’s tired arguments that it had unsuccessfully used to try to kill the database itself when it was still just an idea. “No serious analyst would use this data to draw conclusions. This is data that is unverified, unrepresentative, incomplete and potentially inaccurate,” she told Weisbaum.

Actually, transparency works. The CFPB database is getting results. Indeed, just the other day, the industry trade paper American Banker (not affiliated with the ABA) ran a story, “Customers Are Now Banks’ Greatest Regulatory Threat.” Why? Because, as the story itself points out, if banks don’t handle their complaints quickly and well, their customers will complain to the CFPB. If they want to avoid public shaming or even enforcement action, industry lawyer Alan Kaplinsky told the American Banker, they would do well to “have a very good system in place from the get go to resolve a complaint quickly.”

We’re not surprised, not surprised at all. Our Tax and Budget Project regularly ranks states and municipalities on how transparent their disclosure of budget spending is to taxpayers. We’ve seen dramatic improvements in the quality of disclosure.

It’s a simple lesson that the smart banks will learn. Firms that behave better in the marketplace by handling complaints quickly or eliminating unfair practices will be rewarded with more, and happier, customers. Conversely, firms that persist in dragging out or ignoring complaints about unfair practices may make money in the short run, but ultimately, transparency wins out.

Last week, the CFPB announced a $20 million civil penalty against JP Morgan Chase, which was ordered to refund $309 million to more than 2 million consumers over the deceptive marketing of junky credit card add-on products, some of which were never even delivered to the people who had bought them. This wasn’t the CFPB’s first move against the add-ons, which range from credit card debt cancellation products (“Who will pay your card if you get sick or laid off … or die?”) to the more common credit monitoring and identity theft products. Last year, CFPB went after Discover and Capital One credit cards for deceptive sales of similar products. Our advice: You don’t need any of them, but check your statements to make sure you haven’t already inadvertently been signed up to pay for them.

The CFPB’s enforcement actions help consumers just as the database does. While some banks will no doubt keep selling junky products, smart ones will to preempt the CFPB with their own enforcement action. No bank will want to be Number One in the CFPB database.

In any case, it is clear that the CFPB is getting results for consumers and making markets work better. As Scott Pluta, who heads the CFPB database project, told Weisbaum of NBC: The database may not be popular with the financial services industry, but it’s “making a real difference in people’s lives and in the marketplace.”

If you had to buy insurance, would you ask JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo to choose a policy for you? Probably not. And yet, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is allowing Chase, Wells and other mortgage servicing giants to insurance-shop for millions of homeowners who get saddled with absurdly over-priced coverage while the big banks walk off with kickbacks from the insurance companies.

Every mortgage holder is required to have homeowner’s insurance. Sometimes the insurance lapses or gets canceled, often without the homeowner’s knowledge, making it necessary for the mortgage servicer to step in and purchase a form of emergency coverage known as force-placed or lender-placed insurance. Such emergencies have become far more common since the onset of the housing crisis; and because force-placed insurance costs between two and 10 times as much as regular homeowner’s insurance, it can have the perverse effect of driving families into foreclosure or making it harder for them to obtain affordable loan modifications.

Of course, the servicers like this arrangement fine, because they receive all kinds of sweeteners from insurance vendors, with the added cost built into the price of the coverage. The high premiums are the homeowners’ problem – or the taxpayers’, if the added expense drives a borrower into foreclosure. In that case, Fannie and Freddie are legally bound to reimburse a mortgage servicer for all costs, fair or otherwise.

Although some state regulators have begun to crack down on this practice, the Federal Housing Finance Agency – the nation’s largest housing watchdog – has stymied the search for a solution.

Last November, Fannie Mae – fed up with the inflated cost of force-placed insurance – decided to purchase it directly from insurers instead of reimbursing servicers. That plan would have saved taxpayers $300 million, according to one Fannie Mae analysis. Stunningly, Fannie’s regulator – the Federal Housing Finance Agency – quashed this initiative without any explanation to the public.

The FHFA continues to dither instead of playing a constructive role in bringing relief to homeowners and taxpayers. The agency has signaled that it may soon take steps to prohibit some of the kickbacks plaguing the industry and driving up prices. These practices will be difficult to police, however, and insurance sellers could find new ways to compensate servicers that are not explicitly prohibited by the FHFA.

Instead, the agency should address the fundamentally bad incentives of this marketplace by allowing the GSEs to purchase affordable force-placed insurance policies directly from insurance companies, cutting out the kickbacks. As leading consumer groups explained in a letter to the agency this week, if the FHFA works with the GSEs, the tremendous purchasing power of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can be used to discipline mortgage servicers and force-placed insurance providers alike.

In fact, as the agency plans for the future and builds a new platform that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will use to conduct most of their business, the agency should build force-placed insurance options into the system, making this insurance easier to purchase and less expensive for the GSEs.

The nation urgently needs the FHFA to act as a responsible watchdog so that homeowners can focus on keeping their homes and the GSEs can effectively support a strong housing recovery.

— Sarah Edelman

Sarah Edelman is a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. This piece was originally published on USNews.com.

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